I saw suspicious stains, which were eating into the aluminium, and holes which were rusting the iron. The steel had become porous, and was crumbling, and the copper had grown spongy like a mushroom.
Lastly, the whole machinery was mottled as with a red or greenish leprosy which was neither rust nor verdigris.
On the ground there was a syrupy disgusting pool all round this repulsive heap of refuse, oozing from it and all streaked with colors suggesting unimaginable horrors.
Strange chemical reactions occurred from time to time which made this putrefying metallic flesh boil with great bursting bubbles, and, in its depths, the mechanism rumbled and gurgled intermittently.
Suddenly in a squashy fall, the steering-wheel collapsed, one end going through the floor, and the other through the hood.
A nameless mess was stirring in there, and the horrible stench of organic decomposition flung me backwards.
I had had time to see worms wriggling about in the dark depths.
“What a filthy machine,” said the mechanic.
I tried to make him swallow the idea that vibration sometimes disintegrates metal, and may give rise to molecular modifications like this. He did not seem to believe me, and I, who knew that the truth was stranger still, was forced, in order that he might grasp and accept it, to enlarge on the subject and give him, confidentially, a careful explanation of the whole matter.
Klotz is dead! The car is dead! And so goes to limbo, along with its author, the beautiful theory of an animalized mechanism made immortal by the replacing of parts, and infinitely perfectible!